When a company the size of Intel starts talking about Peer2Peer and social media marketing and integrating Above and Below the line activities you know something serious is happening.

Check out what Nancy Bhagat of Intel told Jennifer Jones of PodTech.net about how Intel is embracing the blogging community.

If you are interested in the behind the scenes making of the Sony Bavia 'Bunnies' you should check this out thanks to Creativity Online.

When working with clients it is always good to have some 'best practice' examples, our own, and other peoples. Forrester have just announced their Groundswell Awards for the use the social media as a communication tool.

Another view on the valuation of social media platform - Facebook - from Jeff Jarvis.

If you care about your brand - and I would argue every manager in a company should - then you should be familiar with the terms conversation marketing, crowdsourcing and the long tail. If not or still wondering how it all fits into 'traditional' marketing and PR then read this great post from Tim Leberecht.

Tim writes about the Conversational Marketing summit held in San Francisco in September. Check out the site as it has videos of the presentations. The event was organised by Federated Media.

According to this BBC report the Littlewoods saga is getting legs. We have the differences of opinion with various trading standards over the legality of Littlewoods actions in retrosepctively charging people the discount taken in error.

What I do not understand is this. Littlewoods are a database marketing company so will have all sorts of credit and historical tracking records in their operational databases. If they issued only 70k+ codes to specific current customers then they know who is illegiable to use them. When someone other than one of the original 70k+ people respond then it is a simple database field look-up to see that they are not elligiable as they do not match the name on the Littlewoods database.

I bet you Littlewoods can identify people who are over their credit limit and put order processing and delivery on hold. Why not the ones who were not entitled to the discount?

An interesting situation at Littlewoods. Apart from proof again that viral online marketing can work - in this case generating 3k extra sales - it does make you wonder about the way some retailers could be using this type of promotion.

The report highlights the fact that by making it look like the special discount codes have been used incorrectly Littlewoods are legally able to re-charge the £25 to customers. Now how many people only bought because of the discount? A PR disaster in the making?

As reported in Management Today Microsoft buys a small stake in Facebook for $245m or so. This values Facebook at $15 billion. So what do they see to get to that valuation? They don't. Consider this a 'licence' fee to allow MS access to a huge database for its ad deleivery programmes. This is another way to compete in the online ad market against Google. What do MS get?

• They get access to a company with 50m very active users
• They get access to a social media community that is prepared to divulge freely profiling data normally hard to get
• They get access to a communication platform that can have profile sensative ads delivered
• They get to learn about the whole area of social media

Social media a fad? Maybe but that is exactly what they said about mobile phones and PCs. Overvalued? Maybe? But how many billions do advertisers pump into traditional media in the hope someone is listening?

Smart move.

If you are interested in how social networking platforms such as Facebook and MySpace are having a real impact on retailing check out this report by Robin Goad of Hitwise Intelligence.

It shows that 'click-through' rates from social media sites to retail sites increased by 153% in less than 12 months.

Combine that with the often stated fact that 'personal recommendation' is one of the most powerful factors influencing a decision to purchase and you see why all marketing and PR people should be actively starting to participate in online conversations.

If you want to see how technology is impacting a 'typical' student today check out Professor Wesch and his students latest video. It would be an interesting exercise to compare across different cultures.

I was interested in the total hours in a day the tasks added up to. Judging by the number of business meetings I attend where mobile phones, laptops and Blackberry devices are switched on and being used I wonder if we are really multitasking or 'info skinny dipping'. How come scientists say it is not possible to concentrate when driving and using a mobile phone but it is possible to be in a meeting and using mobile technology?

An interesting article from CNet News following up on a press release from Datamonitor on its latest research into social media and its growth.

Whilst focussing on investors, and the risk of this rapidly growing market segment slowing down in 2009 and beyond, what is interesting for marketing and HR people alike are the numbers involved.

They estimate that by the end of this year there will 230 million active users of social media tools and it will continue to grow over the next 2 years.

For marketing people that is a lot of people in conversation with each other. Your products and company will almost certainly be being talked about. What are you doing to monior this conversation and become part of it?

For HR this is recruitment ‘pool’ but equally what are potential employees saying about you? Are you are employer of choice? Also those with well established contacts – social and business – indicate a type of personality that may fit well into your company (equally not if you are one of those that has banned social media tools like Facebook). Just think how highly your sales and marketing teams value networking contacts.  

When I was studying for an English language module in my degree I was fascintated about word origins. Coming from the Lake District originally I have a number of dialect words that I still use today that are from Anglo Saxon and Viking origin. I also recently learnt that one of the oldest words pre-dating Anglo Saxon is a Celtic word - Brock (Broc) - badger.

If you want to see them up close check out The Badgerman web site. Gareth Morgan has been a friend of the badgers for 25 years and is now accepted by them. Over a 4 month period Gareth was filmed interacting with them. A 1 hour DVD is available.

(Disclosure: Focus designed the web site.)

An excellent article from the Financial Times on social media with lots of examples of how companies are using it to help their businesses.

Great roundup of Facebook business applications extending its power and usefulness.

An interesting interview by Jennifer Jones with Jeremiah Owyang on his thoughts about Facebook and where it will go in the future.

Check out what the CMO of P&G had to say (thanks to AdAge for the video link) about advertising versus advocacy.

Just look how corporate US is actively using social media communication to engage in conversations. with their customers.

Look at the integrated campaign for Unilever's Dove late last year and the current follow on campaign. Check out the information web site to see how they are using this to engage in conversations with consumers.

Just as the UK reports reports say companies are banning Facebook use comes news from AdAge in the USA that Senior Managers at ones of the worlds largest companies - Unilever, are going back to class to learn the basics on digital marketing. One of their first tasks - create a personal profile page in a social media community.

I don't know about you but I am a frequent user of travel and entertainment 'advising/recommendation' sites. Anything that looks like influenced editorial or advertorial I distrust so I love these 'hear it from the masses' sites. I trust my fellow customer judgements more than these paid entertainment critics. Remember the holiday programmes a few years ago that had families visiting resorts and everyone - including the kids - giving feedback on what they thought? Very powerful.

Here is an excellent update on what the hotel trade  is doing with social media tools and techniques.

Last week I used one of these type of review sites to check on a pub I had seen with a sign outside proudly announcing 'Pub of the Year 2007'. I have no idea what the criteria for the award was so I checked online to see what the 'wisdom of the crowds' would be. It had a number of recent negative customer reviews and some good old ones. Go and risk it? Could have been that they had won the award in January and here we are in October. A lot can happen in 10 months. In the end I went elsewhere as I had other choices and on balance I decided not to risk it. What really influenced me was that the pub had not responded to the criticism. No comment, feedback or explanation.

The truth is I expect the pub is totally unaware of their listing in this review site. The are proudly displaying the sign but ignoring the online reviews by customers. There are plenty of tools to monitor mentions of your company name online.

So what are you doing to engage your customer community? Do you even know what they are saying about you - your product or servive? Online reputation and brand management is growing in importance everyday.  

As reported in Digital Bulletin Cadbury’s is supporting the re-launch of Wispa with a microsite, online campaign and user generated media.

Cadbury’s faced a concerted campaign from Facebook Groups amongst others as reported in the Guardian Unlimited.

In the latest edition of 1to1 Weekly Dr Martha Rogers says a recent US report highlights CEO's are again focussing on the customer. As she puts it...

"After years spent dealing with issues revolving around governance and regulatory changes, CEOs at public companies are focusing more on a long-overlooked aspect of their business: customers."

Source: 3rd Annual NYSE CEO Report

The key part of Martha's article says

"For example, CEOs are planning greater investment (both budget- and time-wise) on managing customer relationships than in the past. The importance of sales growth -- driven by customers -- as a performance measure has increased by 11 percent since the prior study. And on the strategic side, brand, reputation, and investments in corporate social responsibility -- all focused on winning customers -- are increasingly important. CEOs continue to recognize the costliness of losing customers."

Thanks to Marc Schiller for the heads up on this one. Reebok are using social media (Facebook) to engage with communities of runners. No single group as you can see but multiples with over 14,000 members. Powerful and cost effective.

A lot has been written about the negative aspects of Facebook so it is good to look at the other side where it is being used for social awareness and organisation of action. Whatever your personal feelings about the situation in Burma the groups on Facebook are giving a global voice to people who may otherwise have no way of being heard.

Latest statistics from the Facebook site (as at 7.15am - it will be at 250,000 by the end of total)

**GROUP NEWS** Look how we have grown!
30/09/2007 214,000 members
29/09/2007 160,000 Members (100,000 in 1 day! That's over 1 a second!)
28/09/2007 60,000 Members
27/09/2007 30,000 Members
26/09/2007 12,000 Members
25/09/2007 6000 Members
24/09/2007 3,500 Members